I went to elementary school, junior high school, and high school in a medium sized town in New Jersey. I recently heard that my fifth grade teacher, whom I will call Miss D., died last month at the age of 88. She was a dedicated and talented teacher and I was sorry to hear it. May she rest in peace.
This news caused me to remember an incident that year that I had not thought about in decades. On a science test one day, Miss D. gave an extra question, not for credit, not on any topic that we had covered, just to see what we thought. (With hindsight, she was likely trying to see if the crackpot theories of Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko would seem true to us ten-year-olds.)
Her non-credit question was this:
Suppose you raise mice in your basement. Suppose that you begin cutting off the tails of every baby mouse the day it is born. Will the day come, perhaps within 100 generations of mice, when the mice are now born without tails? Give a reason that you believe it will or it won't.
My answer was roughly as follows:
No, the day will never come when the mice are born with no tails.
Why do I believe it won't?
There is no need to experiment on mice. Since the time of the patriarch Abraham, which was likely about 1800 BC, the Jewish people have been practicing circumcision, which means cutting off the foreskins of baby boys at age eight days. That is over 3700 years, more than 100 generations of people, and today Jewish boys are still born with foreskins.
I was quite proud of my answer. I was surprised and not pleased when I arrived in school the next morning and was handed a note by Miss D. saying that I should immediately report to the principal's office. The principal, whom I will call Mr. B., told me that I had shocked Miss D. by referring to a part of the anatomy that should not be discussed in school. When I responded that the word "foreskin" was not obscene and was acceptable in polite conversation, Mr. B. just said, "Not in my school."
Mr. B. said that he was sending a letter home to my parents and that would close the matter to his satisfaction. When the letter arrived two days later, my father thought the whole thing was hilarious. "That guy ought to hear the language the boys used in school when I was your age," he said. "I didn't hear language like that again until I was in the army."
This news caused me to remember an incident that year that I had not thought about in decades. On a science test one day, Miss D. gave an extra question, not for credit, not on any topic that we had covered, just to see what we thought. (With hindsight, she was likely trying to see if the crackpot theories of Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko would seem true to us ten-year-olds.)
Her non-credit question was this:
Suppose you raise mice in your basement. Suppose that you begin cutting off the tails of every baby mouse the day it is born. Will the day come, perhaps within 100 generations of mice, when the mice are now born without tails? Give a reason that you believe it will or it won't.
My answer was roughly as follows:
No, the day will never come when the mice are born with no tails.
Why do I believe it won't?
There is no need to experiment on mice. Since the time of the patriarch Abraham, which was likely about 1800 BC, the Jewish people have been practicing circumcision, which means cutting off the foreskins of baby boys at age eight days. That is over 3700 years, more than 100 generations of people, and today Jewish boys are still born with foreskins.
I was quite proud of my answer. I was surprised and not pleased when I arrived in school the next morning and was handed a note by Miss D. saying that I should immediately report to the principal's office. The principal, whom I will call Mr. B., told me that I had shocked Miss D. by referring to a part of the anatomy that should not be discussed in school. When I responded that the word "foreskin" was not obscene and was acceptable in polite conversation, Mr. B. just said, "Not in my school."
Mr. B. said that he was sending a letter home to my parents and that would close the matter to his satisfaction. When the letter arrived two days later, my father thought the whole thing was hilarious. "That guy ought to hear the language the boys used in school when I was your age," he said. "I didn't hear language like that again until I was in the army."
I hope that there is some pizza at the party which I...